Selling the Company for Drug Money
When Pemberton began growing ill, he started to sell parts of his company. The physician desperately needed money to support his family, as well as his drug addiction, according to the book For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company that Makes it, by Mark Pendergrast.
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On their website, Coca-Cola maintains that Pemberton “never realized the potential of the beverage he created,” so he decided to sell the company in pieces to multiple different partners. He left a third of the company to his son Charles but unfortunately, he sold his share to support his own morphine addiction. He died just six years after his father did, and like his him, Charles never saw the immense empire that Coca-Cola became.